I'm liking the concept of BR p2. I will admit it took me a moment for the penny to drop that the diagram shown is the extra 8 foot to work alongside the existing, but once I got that far it all made sense.

I think your comments show why so many exhibition layouts are BLTs, with half as much frontage taken up by fiddleyards. I think this is partly what draws me to the likes of Robin Gay's Rolvenden, and Dave Hawkins' Great Bardfield - both having a through line but with the 2nd fiddleyard significantly smaller than the 'main'.

When it comes to building I admit i tend to just get on and scratchbuld them. Part of this is due to ignorance of whats actually out there but recently I picked up a couple of Wills kits and have had a go at these instead.

First up is the kit for a lamp store. You actually get 2 in the kit and these are for the slightly different GWR design but can be adapted to something more 'midland' pretty easily by shortening the sides to form a 6ft square structure. U cut out the door and remounted it flush as well as replacing the roof with thinner plasticard. On the other end I added a few extra window bars (see below).

The other kit was for the 'station garage' which i have chopped about to give an industrial looking wooden building. The roof again is plasticard (the wills stuff is quite thick) and the vents are from unit models.

A while ago I showed a picture of the framework for Brettell Roads new roof. I was going to have this done for Scalefour North but given the Covid-19 crisis the show was canceled and the urgency to get it done went with it. However I have turned my attention back to this with thoughts on the material.

The first material I brought was just too heavy so i didn’t even try to use it. The weight wasn’t something i had really considered. This is the second material, much lighter but it let too much light through. On top of that my efforts were too scruffy and would have bugged me if I left it.

So this is material 3 – Much happier now and with the help of my wife much neater as well. The image shows it before I finished the front off and the supports will obviously need to be darkened.

The above image shows the lighting on the layout pretty much as the eye sees it. Not as dark as before but still obviously night time.

Slope sided mineral. I really like the chassis design on this one as the brake gear is separate and for P4 can be moved out to line up with the wheels with just a little bit of trimming. As well as my usual gouache approach for rust I've also tried out some weathering pencils from AK interactive. I won't go into any detail on those as yet as I'm still getting to grips with them.

Bachmann's presflo's are a lovely little model with just a change of wheels, couplings and buffers required. The buffers on these were very odd and I'm not really sure what they were supposed to be so I have used Accurascale ones in their place. I've also added more weight as they hardly weighed anything as supplied. Im not a huge fan of textures in weathering as I believe they often look too heavy in 4mm scale but on these wagons the dry concrete could often look really caked on so i used talc in wet paint ad part of the process.

Lovely photos, and I will cherish the idea of the royal family travelling through the midlands by railbus. I can still remember the fairground-ride trackholding when trsvelling on them on the Barking to Tottenham line. More generally, the illusion of the nasty wet night is beautifully sustained.

Anyone modelling in 4mm scale for any length of time has probably come across the Airfix/Mainline/possibly Dapol/ Bachmann 21, 22 or 24 ton Iron ore hoppers. Based on a Charles Roberts version with the standard, at the time, stretched to fit compromises to fit a generic 10ft wagon chassis. They do however make a good little project for 'tarting up a bit'.

Geoff Kent wrote a great article about just such an exercise in MRJ 182. I have however deviated from his sage advice in a few areas.

The hopper is easy with 3mm cut out center but offset to the side of the bracing to hide the cut. For the chassis I cut it into 3 parts to retain the middle detail. Geoff thinned the base and removed the top of the chassis on his models but I decided to cut the base away around the edge and mount the chassis flush with the top. The chassis being a Parkside 9ft example.

The door closing gear was knocked up from microstrip and a few bits of brass., Shiny bits on the chassis came from Ambis, Mainly Trains and Bill Bedford.

After a light weathering. I still need to add the rain effect yet mind you. The ladders are from Stenson Models.